I don't like convoluted "subtitled" sequels with no number as I can never remember where that game falls in the series (eg. Is AC: Brotherhood or Revelations older? In which order is KH: 358/2, KH: Chain of Memories and KH: Birth by Sleep?). By putting a number (like most movie and game franchises do) I know exactly where the game falls.

Why complicate matters unecessarily?

If you must do subtitles, at the very least, put the number (Uncharted 2: Among Thieves; Xenosaga 2: Jenseits von Gut und Bose; etc...)

Note: Still despise the new captchas. I don't give three shits about Courtyard Marriott and refuse to answer any questions about it.

Owyn_Merrilin:Funny thing is, I was thinking of that series as a good example of the third type that Yahtzee was talking about. The Franchise titles are the extra part that nobody mentions. It's not Dark Forces II, it's Jedi Knight. It's not Jedi Knight II, it's Jedi Outcast. The sequel numbers are mostly just to tell you it's all part of the same series.

I agree that it's at least unambiguous which game you're talking about, but Jedi Outcast having the title "Jedi Knight II" doesn't lead you to believe that it's the third game in a continuous series. It's just silly.

mjc0961:If you think FF13 is the only game that actually uses colors... You just made YouTube comments look intelligent.

Should I flag you for your rude comment?

Okay, poor choice in words. But Square Enix is the only game developer that tries to be weird, different, outrageously colorful, while most games are just 'dark' gray or brown, or just go for goofy silliness. Everyone else is going for the same old, same old sci-fi, fantasy,or modern warfare shooters, and Square is the only group that takes a chance on something weird, like, adding a car engine on a sword. Do you know any other games that would do that?

I thought Halo 4 was a good title for the game, as it reminded potential buyers that they would be returning to the gameplay style of Halo 3, rather than continuing the innovations introduced in Halo: Reach. If they'd decided to make a game more similar to Reach, perhaps they would have called the game Halo: Requiem, or even Halo: Infinity, which I think is the name of the Spartan Ops campaign.

mjc0961:I'd rather have numbers than all that other shit because it's just confusing. If you aren't a fan of the franchise, it becomes harder to learn the order and whatnot. You might have known that Magnum Force, The Enforcer and Sudden Impact are sequels to Dirty Harry, but how the hell are people who aren't already familiar with that series of movies supposed to know that first, they're sequels, and second, what order they go in without doing extra research? At least with Halo I can tell that it goes Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4 without doing an extra research as soon as I see the titles. There's other stuff like ODST and Reach in there as well, but they have fuck all to do with Master Chief so you aren't missing out on anything by not having them immediately fit in. They're just backstory games. The numbers in the main games work fine if you consider the numbered games to be the adventures of Master Chief, regardless of if he's still working on the same threat to humanity in each game or not. Huge difference to that stupid shit Assassin's Creed did:

How the fuck are you supposed to tell the important games from the backstory and the completely pointless bullshit at a glance? There are non-numbered games that are important parts of the plot, non-numbered games that are just backstory, and non-numbers games that contribute fuck all to the story being told in the rest of the franchise. You would, again, need to look that up, like I just had to on Wikipedia to sort all that bullshit out. Basically, the problem is that Assassin's Creed 3 isn't Assassin's Creed 3, it's Assassin's Creed 5. Brotherhood is 3 and Revelations is 4, because if you don't play them you'll be missing important parts of 5.

But it's even more confusing! Assassin's Creed 2 Discovery and Assassin's Creed 3 Liberation still have the numbers in, so they must be important, right? WRONG! They're the least important mother fuckers in that mess. And yet Brotherhood and Revelations have no number despite being required playing if you want to know what's going on? So stupid. They could have at LEAST done this:

That way all the important games still carry a number that signifies they are part of the main story that you NEED to play in order to understand what's going on, and the completely unimportant games have no number so they don't look important when they aren't. Obviously, the easiest thing would have still been this, though:

Creative, no, but at least you can tell what the important games are and what order they go in without having to run off to Wikipedia to look it all up.

Hyakunin Isshu:Ugh. It's like how he complains about how games should have more colors to them, then totally insults FFXIII (see mind jack) for looking "S***" because it's the only game that actually uses colors.

If you think FF13 is the only game that actually uses colors... You just made YouTube comments look intelligent.

This right here is why I stopped caring about Assassin's Creed. And now I know that there are way more unimportant garbage games in the series than I have even been able to keep track of. The sad thing is that I really like a lot of the game play, but hate the story and characters. This unfortunately means that any new IP that comes out that attempts to present similar gameplay but without the horribly mangled and unimportant story will be met with Ubisofts legal team instead of being praised as succeeding where Ubisoft has failed.

One thought on game sequel naming, as opposed to other media, is in it's association with computer software does lend to game.exe v2.0

I guess that's kinda an old outlook, but it is relevant as far as the incremental mechanical additions and improvements (assuming they ARE improvements), perticularly to games like Halo, Mario, CoD, whatever.

That said, there's no accounting for narrative in that angle, which is really the fleshy context and body of presentation around the bones of gameplay. Also the main contention of the article.

Raiyan 1.0:Well, then there's Criterion, naming their first NFS just Hot Pursuit while there was already a Hot Pursuit and Hot Pursuit 2. And then they reboot Most Wanted. For chrissake! It was out in 2005... oh, wait, now I feel old. Damn!

Unfortunately, you've only gotten the silver medal for finding naming idiocy. I win the gold. While it may be confusing that Most Wanted 2005 and 2012 are both titled the same thing in the same gen, EA Sports takes the big victory in stupidity.

This gen there are two FIFA Street games on the Xbox 360:FIFA Street and FIFA Street 3

Where's part 2 you ask? It's on the previous gen of consoles. They decided to reboot the series halfway through the gen. so if you go to a store and find FIFA Street and FIFA Street 3, the older game is 3. What the ...

Damned EA.

PS. While I've always been an advocate of creative naming without numbers, it does get harder to keep track of where any title is in the order of things. This is why people refer to things like Gabriel Knight 3. The numbers are for the file systems in our heads.

Another benefit to not using numbers is avoiding region-inconsistent numbering. The most famous example of this is Final Fantasy (where, until recently, Japanese IV was American II and Japanese VI was American III -- to this day, when someone says "Final Fantasy III", it's still not immediately clear which game they're talking about), but it also applies to the Clock Tower and King's Field series.

In both of those cases, the first game was not released outside of Japan, but the second game and onward were. So the game called "King's Field" in America is the game called "King's Field II" in Japan, different from both the game called "King's Field" in Japan (which was not released in America) and the game called "King's Field II" in America (which is called "King's Field III" in Japan). The Clock Tower series has a similar situation, and if each game had its own title then nothing would have needed to be changed and we could have avoided all this confusion.

For whatever reason, when this article is still loading, and most of the assets are missing, for a few seconds (for me at least) it looks like this. At first I thought that that was in fact the entire article as intended by Yahtzee, and my response was pretty much "Yeah, that sounds right".

Falseprophet:Bravo, Yahtzee. But how then do we classify the Final Fantasy series, which has numbered sequels that have buttfuck all to do with each other?

Despite the numbers, that's sort of a James Bond or Halo thing as well. I prefer to think that Final Fantasy is actually the story of Cid (just as the Star Wars movies is the story of two droids, or Mass Effect is the story of weird gravity powers).

phlip:For whatever reason, when this article is still loading, and most of the assets are missing, for a few seconds (for me at least) it looks like this. At first I thought that that was in fact the entire article as intended by Yahtzee, and my response was pretty much "Yeah, that sounds right".

After playing Dragon Age: Origins, I was really looking forward to playing the original Dragon Age. Then they managed to take things to the next level with Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening. Just thank god Activision didn't go the same way with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 3: Black Ops 2.

Dondonalien44:Halo 4 is a confusing title numerically as well, as it is the sixth fps in the series. Seventh game, if you count Halo Wars.

Well, it is the fourth game with the Master Chief, if you count "Combat Evolved" and "Combat Evolved Anniversarry" as the same game (as the latter is just a remake) while ODST, Reach and Wars were Spin-Offs starring other characters. So, if you see it that way, Halo 4 is a very justified name. Granted, they COULD have named it something different (as it's a new trilogy entirely) like "Halo: Prometheans" and the two sequels "Halo: Prometheans 2" and "Halo: Prometheans 3", respectively. But they decided not to and called it simply Halo 4. No Subtitle-nonsense, just a plain number.

And yes, it is a sequel - so having SOME knowledge of the previous game is kind of expected. Which Yathzee didn't have because he didn't bother to pay much attention to the story from what I could gather from any of the previous Halo Reviews. Your fault, pal, don't blame the game for it.

Yeah, I have to go with AVGN when it comes to this matter. I like numbers. If you want to be creative, make the body of work itself interesting, not the title. If you want to be fancy, have it in Roman numerals.

I really can't stand it when titles go with subtitles, or reboot names to sound original. There has to be some form of connection that lets the audience know which title they're about to watch/read and in which chronological order it came in.

There has only been a few exceptions that I've let slide. Bond is one of them, one reason being that I can never imagine them all being in chronological order or having continuity considering there's been like 6 bonds within 50 years. And the idea that all those movies are in continuity of each other makes my head hurt.

Now take Harry Potter for an example. I'm no fucking Y-gen millennial, I'm an X-gen, so I have no fucking clue where to begin with this series because when the first book came out I was too old to get into it (well, you're never too old, but I was told this was originally a children's series, so I never bothered till I was told different) and by that time the movies came out and I started noticing them, I had no fucking clue where to begin since none of them were numbered. And what is there like 10 of them? I don't know, because they're not numbered! One of the is about some Asgard, Ashhard, something prisoner right? I don't know because the series is expecting me to know about weird names in the movies, and I'm a complete outsider on this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, google schoogle. I've already lost interest again just thinking about how chronologically confused I am about them all.

Another has been giving subtitles for trilogies, and as long as they don't have stupid names. Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rinds, and Star Wars movies come to mind. When there's only three titles it's easier to remember which came before which. And as for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dooms sake (given the fact that it's a prequel) it was probably a good choice that it wasn't called Indy 2 because that would have been confusing. Now I mentioned stupid subtitles, and I think I don't need to explain myself on that part. If the subtitles stars with re- and ends with -tion, it sucks and the guy that came up with it needs to die.

Well Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, while not being true sequels, are spiritual predecessors/successors of each other with a unique naming scheme. I like their naming system, and would certainly like to see others do the same.

The Elder Scrolls does it alright. No one refers to them using number, and very rarely are they even referred to using "The Elder Scrolls." The vast majority of references just use the location name (barring Arena and Oblivion). So while the full name is, for example, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it is commonly referred to using just Skyrim, taking the number issue out of it.

Edit: For larger series, like Halo and Star Wars, it is justified in having the universe name in the title, but it still should have something besides just a number for main releases. Everyone knows what you mean when you say Knights of the Old Republic, for example, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic works well.

Halo: Reach works well. Halo 3: ODST, however, sounds like an expansion of Halo 3 and not a full-blown game.

triorph:Star wars is a movie where the sequels were named in numbers, although they did make some effort to add in new names, and give the numbers not starting from 1.

Fun fact: A New Hope (the first one, episode 4) was originally released as Star Wars, without any number or sub-name. The sequel, Empire Strikes Back, was the first that had a sub-name and a number.

Still, the sub-name is generally used way more amongst fans than the series number, just like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is generally called Oblivion pr TES: Oblivion and almost never called The Elder Scrolls IV.

in my Steam library and then have no idea in what order those games are supposed to be played, which means I have to make a trip to Wikipedia to find it out. With some plain old good numbers, I wouldn't have that problem. Given how every game gets turned into a franchise with at least half a dozen titles and spin-offs on multiple platform, handhelds, phones and tablets some good old numbers can help a lot in keeping track of what is available and how it fits together.

This article is amusing considering Microsoft made Bungie tag the "Combat Evolved" subtitle onto the end of the original Halo because they didn't think it would sell by just being called "Halo." How times have changed.